Electronic systems and circuits have made a significant contribution towards the advancement of modern society and are utilized in a number of applications to achieve advantageous results. Numerous electronic technologies such as digital computers, calculators, audio devices, video equipment, and telephone systems facilitate increased productivity and cost reduction in analyzing and communicating data, ideas and trends in most areas of business, science, education and entertainment. Frequently, these activities involve video encoding and decoding. However, encoding and decoding can involve complicated processing that occupies valuable resources and consumes time.
The continuing spread of digital media has led to a proliferation of video content dissemination. Video content typically involves large amounts of data that are relatively costly to store and communicate. Encoding and decoding techniques are often utilized to attempt to compress the information. However, as higher compression ratios are attempted by encoding and decoding techniques, the loss of some information typically increases. If there is too much information “lost” in the compression the quality of the video presentation and user experience deteriorates.
Video compression techniques such as H.264 compression often use temporal and spatial prediction to compress raw video streams. A typical compression engine may contain an intra prediction module, a motion prediction module, a transform module, and an entropy coding module. For baseline profile 4:2:0 video, a macroblock is defined as comprising a 16×16-pixel luma block and two 8×8-pixel chroma blocks. In H.264 video coding, each macroblock can be coded as either an intra-prediction (I) macroblock, or as an inter-prediction (P) macroblock. Typically, most of the macroblocks in an encoded bitstream are P-type macroblocks, and hence, calculating the cost of the macroblock as an I-type macroblock is very costly in terms of computing resources.